Il Poggio

From 1760 to the early 1900s, the Fusco family was a family of farmers intent on measuring themselves against the heavy hill terrain of the ancient Samnium. The opportunity to become winemakers appeared, in full Italy’s fascist period, in original circumstances that have always been handed down with a smile in the family. Grandfather Barbato, an emigrant in Brazil, used to send money to his family, along with the news concerning him. Indirect recipient of the letter was the Potestà di Torrecuso, then a very small rural center, where only a few and mostly men of the institutions were able to read and write. Perhaps anxious to surrender to an extra temptation, the fact is that the head of the municipal government didn’t think twice about pocketing the money. He read the Brazilian letter to the family, flying over the references to the attached money and focusing on the health of the writer. After years of this correspondence, one fine day it happened that Barbato announced his return to Torrecuso for the following month. Poor authority, he almost took a hit. But the survival instinct of being able to solve everything. In the form of a liberal donation, the “Defenze” fund was granted to the Fusco family in Torrecuso. That then grandfather Barbato never managed to embark, to pass naturally to a better life, it is the epilogue that moved the children and shook the rapacious feelings of the Potestà. The fact is that from those 3 hectares of wild hills magnificently exposed to the sun, naturally suited to the cultivation of the vine, the history of “Il Poggio” began with the planting of the vineyards of Aglianico. In the Defenze district the Fusco family farm is still located today. Here Giuseppe, the son of Carmine and father of Carmine and Marco, began with commitment to start the first Aglianico vintages to which he added, in the mid-1980s, also the cultivation of Falanghina grapes. In 1997 the big step: Carmine e Marco, decided not to simply cultivate the vineyard but to produce wine. Among the local winemakers the Fusco family can historically boast some anticipations: the first cement tanks for fermentation, the first rotary cultivator and above all the culture of evolving wine in wood. Even now, on the farm, two 50 hectolitres local oak barrels are displayed, which grandfather Carmine commissioned from a local cooper. In 2001, the first bottles of Aglianico and Falanghina were sold. Today, Il Poggio exports mainly to Northern Europe, Canada and the United States.